Cars.com chooses cage colocation, cross connects, and remote hands services to support development of new on-site features.
Cars.com Co-location with CoreSite
Launched in 1998, Cars.com is an award-recognized online destination for car shoppers and owners that offers information from experts and consumers to help research, price and find new and used cars, as well as information around service and repair for existing car owners. With more than 31 million monthly visits to its web properties, Cars.com offers millions of new and used vehicle listings, experts and consumer reviews, side-by-side comparison, build and price tools, unbiased editorial content and much more.
Project Details
Client name:
cars.com
Location:
Colocation
Completed:
2017
Value:
Modern facilities, rapid scalable infrastructure, customer-centric
Category:
Cloud Co-Location
Architect:
Coresite
— James O'Sullivan, VP of Business Technology, Cars.com
CoreSite won out over good competitors because their solution offers better capabilities within the data center. As importantly, the CoreSite team has demonstrated that they clearly understand our goals and needs. Ultimately, it was a rather easy decision
For nearly two decades, Cars.com has been the go-to source for car shoppers hoping to avoid the hassles and inconveniences of the carbuying process. Today, the company empowers millions of shoppers every month to make better purchasing decisions by providing a wealth of unbiased, well-sourced research, editorial content, and buying tips.
However, consistently delivering high-quality content to an ever-growing audience is not an easy task. As demand for the company’s editorial content and data has increased, so has its need for data storage and business continuity solutions.
“We don’t specialize in data center build-out or management, but we are experts in how those technologies affect our business,” says Jason O’Sullivan, Cars.com’s Vice President of Business Technology. “In order to continue delivering new, powerful tools for our users, we needed to better align our resources and business goals by housing our operations in scalable, efficient, and cost-effective data centers.”
O’Sullivan and his team worked closely with Jones Lang LaSalle to evaluate more than 20 search criteria across multiple data center solutions providers. In the end, Cars.com was drawn to CoreSite’s modern facilities, rapidly scalable infrastructure, customer-centric support team, and overall value as a vendor.
Cars.com chose CoreSite’s cage colocation, cross connects, and remote hands services to power its development environment and disaster recovery strategies. CoreSite’s high-density, flexibly configured cages enable the Cars.com team to easily scale to meet business demands. And leveraging CoreSite’s remote hands services to act as an extension of the Cars.com team provides a faster response to critical on-site needs.
Meanwhile, the hardwired cross connects support the company’s failover strategies by providing high-performance, reliable interconnections between various network locations for streamlined disaster recovery. They also make it easier for the company to peer with partner organizations and better manage network latency, enabling O’Sullivan’s team to continue expanding the company’s services to its customers.
Migrating to a new data center isn’t easy; it’s even more challenging under tight timelines. Fortunately, working with CoreSite and data migration services provider Transitional Data Services (TDS), who oversaw the infrastructure resettlement, meant that Cars.com was able to complete its move quickly and efficiently, with just a few months remaining on its existing contract.
In addition to the peace of mind that comes with finding a new home, the smooth transition to CoreSite’s data center has had a tangible and measurable effect on the business. Most notably, the company’s new infrastructure is easier to manage and more cost-effective, allowing O’Sullivan to allocate resources where they’re needed and reduce the company’s long-term total cost of ownership.
O’Sullivan believes that CoreSite’s flexibility gives Cars.com a distinct competitive advantage. Now, the company can be more responsive to the changing demands of its business, reacting more quickly to market trends, and greatly accelerating the development of new features, functionality, and applications for a superior customer experience.